CES 2007: Webaroo promises free offline browsing

Posted January 8, 2007 - 18:03
by
Aaron McKenna

Las Vegas (NV) - Offline browsing is not a terribly difficult thing to achieve, if you do a bit of running around - manually downloading and saving a whole series of internet pages is no fun, however, and half of technology is making simple but tedious things easier. Enter Webaroo, who introduced us to their service for downloading a multitude of web pages for offline browsing.

The service can crawl a web domain and download as much or as little as one likes, so that for example one doesn't do a Google search for "Pubs, Dublin" and get about a billion pages downloading. The service uses compression to cut out redundant web elements and keep hard drive usage down (moderately, we'd assume, there's only so much you can compress).

The rub might be Webaroo's business model, which is based in planting ads into your downloaded content. Issues of privacy are also raised, in that the service obviously tracks your usage in order to serve contextual ads. Webaroo were insistant that the service won't impinge upon users privacy, but further investigation post-CES might be in order.

That's a bit of a moot point for now however, as this is a startup which hasn't attracted the hoardes of advertisers from Evil Corp. just yet.